


A day at the fair

by Bumblie_Bee



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Gen, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt/Comfort, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter Parker Whump, Tony needs a hug too, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 10:49:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29965245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bumblie_Bee/pseuds/Bumblie_Bee
Summary: In which Peter and Morgan go missing inside a haunted house and Tony struggles to solve the situation.
Relationships: Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe) & Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 5
Kudos: 57
Collections: 2021 Irondad Sprint Event





	A day at the fair

**Author's Note:**

> This fic kicked and fought its way into existence, but here it finally is! 
> 
> Thanks you to itsreallylaterightnow for putting on the event and for betaing! 
> 
> Prompts: Trap-Floor, Instability, Cracked, Plummet, Double-Vision, Eyes Open, Dark, Tachycardia, Hoarse, Numb (And yes I, a human idiot, tried to wedge them into one fic)

The sky was getting dark as the night drew in, the lights of the fairground becoming brighter, more vibrant in comparison, as they flashed brightly on the rides around him and danced off the glasses of the tired, slightly worn looking man Tony was very quickly losing his patience with.

“What do you mean they’re not in there?” he demanded, glancing up from the man to the swinging shutters of the ghost emblazoned haunted manor he’d been waiting outside for the past forty minutes. The lights were on now, flickering along the eaves of the roof in a way he couldn’t quite decide was through design or disrepair, and flashing in the pattens of artificial eyes behind the darkened windows.

Some of the windows were open, Tony had taken a photo of Morgan waving out of one not so long ago, Peter in the background holding her up so she could see out, but others contained nothing but ghosts or witches or faux, floating cobwebs behind their shutters.

The man shrugged, hands in his pockets, idly chewing on a piece of gum like two children hadn’t just mysteriously vanished inside his amusement.

“I dunno, they’re just not.”

Whether the man was genuinely dumb at tracking down two kids in a contained building or being deliberately evasive, Tony couldn’t quite decide, but he really was one more useless answer away from being blasted back into the crumbling wooden walls of the tumbledown haunted manor.

Not that Tony had a suit with him, he was retired, but he could make it work.

Fighting the urge to shove the idiot of a man out of his way so he could check the house himself, Tony glared with enough venom a fully grown python would be proud and pressed on Peter’s contact for the twelfth time in the past ten minutes. Like before, it didn’t even ring, the start of Peter’s garbled recorded voicemail message instantly playing tinnily out into the cooling night air before Tony shut down the call with a swipe.

The man looked at it and shrugged.

“Maybe they just wandered-,” he started, before an elbow to the ribs as Tony pushed past cut off his words with a grunt.

***

Someone was crying.

Not sobbing, exactly, but their shaky wet inhales and shuddery exhales still had enough sound to them that the chipped into Peter’s already aching head like a pickaxe. The crying was close by too, and as Peter woke a little more, he realised their owner was pressed up beside him, sitting against his stomach, their small body soft and warm through the thin fabric of his hoodie unlike unforgiving floor below.

Concrete, cold and hard and rough against his cheek, and as he was well aware of by this point in his vigilante career, probably not a good sign.

Neither was the smell of iron mixing with the dampness hanging heavy in the air.

Neither was the fact that with his memories foggy and his head aching too nauseatingly for him to really think, Peter really couldn’t work out where he was, or why he was there, or who the crying beside him was. The mechanical whirring, clicking, clunking sounds he couldn’t place but prayed would stop jabbing at his tender brain like a red poker wasn’t exactly helping either. 

Moaning softly, Peter lifted a hand to rub what he knew would be ineffectively at his throbbing temple, only to be instantly rewarded with a bold of white-hot pain shooting straight through his shoulder and neck.

“Ahh.”

“Petey?” the crying voice beside him sniffled, the words small and wet and heartbreakingly scared despite their hopeful lilt, and then the figure pressed so tight against him he could feel her breathe moved a little, turning until she could prod softly at his cheek. “Petey, are you awake?”

Morgan.

Peter’s already churning stomach turned to ice, and he instantly forced his muddled, throbbing brain online.

“Mo, ‘s okay,” he tried, the words coming out quietly murmured and awfully slurred, his sloppy, uncoordinated tongue sliding over the syllables like a puppy on an icy pavement but still clear enough that Morgan gasped a little. Her inhale was thick and choked with tears.

“Peter?”

“Mmm, who else?”

Wherever they were was dark when Peter finally got his leaden eyelids to draw, a relief of sorts to his aching head, and when his eyes adjusted to the low lighting enough that a tearstained Morgan swam into some semblance of focus, he found her rumpled and dirty and wide eyed with terror, but thankfully seemingly unharmed.

Sucking in a breath, Peter forced himself upright more out of a stubborn desire to comfort Mo than because he thought it was a good idea, pushing on the dusty, cracked floor to ease himself up off his sore side, only to instantly regret it.

Pinching his lips together did nothing to stop the sharp inhale as his skull throbbed hotly at the change in orientation and sudden bolts of fiery pain lanced up his neck and down his previously numb left arm. The ends of his broken collarbone ground and strained under the weight of his arm, and instinctively he clamped his right hand to his shoulder in a vain attempt to stabilise the fracture he couldn’t remember getting. 

Which, well, he wasn’t sure what was worse at the moment, the break itself or the fact he’d fallen hard enough to cause it and couldn’t remember doing so at all.

At least it wasn’t his neck he’d broken, he supposed.

At least it wasn’t Morgan who was hurt.

Trying to take comfort in that as white-hot fire shot up his tingling arm from fingertips to jaw and his skull throbbed angrily along with the panicked beat of his heart, Peter grit his teeth as he waited for the burning to settle and the spots to fade from his blurry vision. His head was spinning awfully as he sat there breathing in measured, shaky huffs through his nose, his balance off with what he decided was a probable concussion, and his stomach was queasily protesting, threatening a revolt he really didn’t want it to have.

“You’re hurt?”

The words were softly spoken, wet and high and as terrified as Peter felt, and he automatically swallowed his tears and forced his concussed, pain-fried brain into gear enough to give Morgan what he hoped was a comforting smile despite himself.

“I’m okay.” The words came out hoarse, raspy and still a little slurred and not convincing even to his own ringing ears, so it was no wonder Morgan eyed him with panicked disbelief. One brow raised over her wide, dark eyes and her lips twitched in an expression so similar to one Peter had seen Tony wear on countless occasions he would have laughed had she not looked so close to full on crying. 

Had he still not been close to full on crying too.

“You wouldn’t wake up, Petey,” she told him anxiously, still kneeling so close beside him he could feel each shuddery inhale and see the tears glistening in her wide, terrified eyes. “I tried for ages and ages.”

“s alright, Mo, I’m awake now.” Shakily, he reached out to take her hand, biting his lip as his shoulder drooped again but giving hers a squeeze he hoped was a little more comforting than his words when she took it. The nod she replied with as small and timid, and honestly, probably more for Peter’s own benefit than because she actually believed him, but he didn’t press it.

Keeping hold of her hand, he steadied himself and looked around the room, squinting a little in a vain attempt to bring his bleary vision into some sort of focus only to find very little of interest within it for him to focus on.

Wherever they were was small enough Peter could almost have stretched his arms and touched the dirty, tarnished metal walls on all four sides from where he sat had he wanted to, more a container or gapless cage than a room. Below, the floor was unremarkable rough grey, rubble covered but unmarred save for the bloodied crack where his head had been, and the ceiling was so far above Peter couldn’t make any of it out in the dark.

There wasn’t a door interrupting the monotonous grey of the walls, not one Peter could see anyway, and his stomach clenched in fear of what that could imply.

“Mo, do you… can you remember what happened? Do you know where we are?”

Surprisingly, Morgan nodded, frowning up at him with a worried expression like he should probably know that too.

Which, well, yeah he probably should, but the memories he had of the rides and treats of the theme park he remembered being in with Mo and Tony didn’t really tie in all that well to his current concussed, injured, and trapped in a hole state.

He didn’t remember what happened, didn’t know who had taken him or why, and more importantly, he didn’t know why Morgan was with him too.

“Petey, we fell,” Morgan told him, worrying her tiny lip, before her hand pointed to the ceiling, “We fell from up there.”

***

Inside the house was as rundown as the outside, and Tony was seriously starting to question his judgment in letting Peter and Morgan in there in the first place. The walls were derelict more from lack of care than themeatics, and the floors felt worryingly unstable even where it wasn’t purposefully rocking or rolling or spinning.

“If you don’t shut this off I’m going to shut this place down permanently,” Tony grunted as he made his way unsteadily across the faux wooden floor of the upstairs landing, trying to balance on the moving, sliding panels with limited success. 

The ride was irritating, the fact the man beside him crossed the moving floors as lithely as a mountain goat, but Tony was honestly much more concerned about the fact that the two floors they’d checked so far contained nothing more than garish ghouls and animatronic witches and flickering eyes in the walls. 

At the end of the landing were two more rooms, one full of moving furniture spinning tableware that looked vaguely ‘Alice in wonderland’ themed, and the other a seizure risk of flashing lights and warping mirrors, but both were as empty of humans as the eight they’d already checked.

The idiot of a man following him about looked smug enough about the still missing missing children to deserve a fist to the face, and Tony would probably have obliged had he had the time to spare.

Despite the nimble if idle steps of the idiot of a man beside him, the moving staircases up to the third, then fourth floors were more of a challenge for Tony’s still quite not up to standard sense of balance than he’d have liked. They sent him rocking into peeling wall on more than one occasion, earnt him a heavy and unintentional decent once too, but the lack of either of his children on either of those floors was much more of a disappointed.

“Peter? Morgan?”

His anxious, voice echoed back, bouncing off the mirrors and the walls and reverberating eerily off the slide at the end of the corridor, but neither Peter nor Morgan responded.

The house was quiet save for the creepy, repetitive music that drilled into his skull and the cackling of the faux ghosts that popped out from behind moving photo frames at regular intervals. 

“See dude, no kids-”

Tony pushed open the final door before the slide marked exit in strobing, mostly functional blue lights, and the man behind him finally fell briefly silent before he let out a murmur.

“Oh, shit.”

***

“Oh god, we’re inside the ride,” Peter groaned, rubbing at his sore head as he frowned up at the ceiling and the hole he now knew was somewhere high above them. It could have been worse, certainly, they could actually have been kidnapped, taken by someone with a vendetta against Tony or Iron Man or even of Spider-Man, someone who actually meant to cause them harm, but it was just a summary of his shitty Parker luck could be that they could end up trapped inside the bowels of a haunted house when at a visit to a fairground they had been meant to be enjoying.

At least Morgan was okay, he reasoned as he rubbed at his temple, terrified and worried but physically okay.

Peter had seen to that one, he remembered so now.

The memories of how they got to be falling through the floor of a room they probably hadn’t meant to have been in were bleary, but he now remembered with sharp clarity the pinch at the nape of his neck followed by the feeling of unprecedented panic when the centre of the floor opened and a falling Morgan screamed.

Admittedly, his instant, instinctive reaction of diving in after and holding her safe against his chest as they plummeted through the darkness hadn’t been his smartest move; his head still throbbed as a result of the uncushioned collision it had had with the concrete far below and his collarbone burnt angrily in competition, but Peter didn’t regret it for a second.

“I guess we should have a look for a way out, Mo,” he said trying to smile comfortingly through the dark. It wasn’t like their situation was dreadful, there was only so long they could stay trapped in the ride before someone came looking, but how long it would take them to realise where they were was another question entirely, and not one Peter was overly keen on finding out the answer to.

It didn’t help that his phone was dead, his fault entirely for letting Morgan use up the last of the battery recording her horror house vlog, but it did leave them stuck in the dark with no means of contacting anyone to tell them where they were.

The painful, pounding in his skull doubled with the change in pressure as Peter stood, and what little vision he had in the darkened room tunnelled threateningly. It was kind of lucky the room they’d ended up in was so small, because there was at least something to stumble into when his head lightened and his hearing hummed and his already wonky sense of balance shorted out entirely.

He hissed as his back made contact with the wall, his already pounding skull knocking hard against the metal and sending bright spots dancing through the darkness of his vision, and before he could catch himself, his knees had buckled and he’d slid back down to the floor.

“Ow, okay, that could’a gone better,” he mumbled dazedly, cradling his spinning head in the hand not tingling limply against the floor. His face was sticky he realised absently, tacky with trails of drying blood from his hairline down to his chin, and Peter found himself briefly relived that it was dark if only to spare the already scared Morgan his likely grisly appearance.

He hadn’t even wondered where the tang of iron had come from until then.

“Petey?”

Despite himself, Peter’s already aching heart gave a throb at her wavering tone, and he looked up again, swallowing thickly as bile rose from his swirling stomach. Trying to blink the twin Morgans back into one, he gave her what he hoped was a comforting smile.

“I’m okay, Mo, jus’… just a bit dizzy is all,” he told her, trying not to wince as his own words chipped at his brain like a pickaxe, escalating the dull, overall ache and driving fire into his temples. His sticky hand shook as he held it out to her invitingly, intending to pull her onto his lap while he waited for his head to stop spinning quite so much and his nauseous stomach to settle enough that another attempt standing wouldn’t risk making their iron scented prison infinitesimally worse.

Through blurry eyes, he watched as she bit at her lip, anxiously eyeing him as though wondering if she should accept his invitation or not, before she gave in and carefully eased herself onto his crossed legs. Her body felt warm as she cured against him like the kid she pretended not to be, comforting even with her elbows sharp against his ribs, and as best he could, Peter wrapped his arms around her.

He’d try to find a way out again in a minute, he promised himself as he held her close and rested his heavy, spinning head back against the wall. He would. He had to, for Mo.

***

The room was as void of Peter and Morgan as the rest of the house, Tony realised, much to his despair, but unlike all the others they had previously been inside, it was also dark and quiet and eerily still. The dramatic music still drifting in from the hallways and other rooms was absent within, the cackling and intermittent howling too, and the flashing lights and bright eerie eyes that lit the walls around the rest of the house were conspicuously missing.

It left a hollow, deserted feeling to the room that if anything, was more eerie than all the rest of the haunted house put together.

Turing on the flashlight on his phone, Tony found the unseeing eyes that had followed him throughout his search were still present, the bulbs behind just no longer glowing and their once moving pupils fixed and powerless, and when he shone the light around, he found the rest of the décor matched enough for him to instantly know the room he stood in had once been a part of the attraction too.

Unlike all the others he’d been in, the room was still, the animatronics frozen and staring and the rigged to move furniture unnervingly stationary in comparison to the rest of the house. A thick, heavy layer of dust coated the tables and chairs and clung on hair and lashes of the cackle of witches in the corner. It turned the once moving hardwood flooring grey and dull, mottled in places where recent footsteps had disturbed it on the path to the arrow adorned door at the far end of the room.

Tony stared at it, then at the once flashing bulbs around the many exit signs on the door on the far wall, unlit but beaconing all the same, and stepped into the room.

“Oi! Stop!”

The man grabbed his arm from behind in panic and Tony flinched around, just about to give the infuriating idiot a piece of his anxious mind when an almighty clattering sound from the room behind grabbed back his attention. He turned just in time to watch as a square in the dusty, footprint scuffed wood of the floor gave way entirely.

***

The mechanical clatter above Peter’s head startled him from his meandering thoughts, startled Morgan as she sat curled up in his lap with her shoulder pressed up against his ribcage and her head resting just below his chin, and drew a hiss from his lips as his head protested the noise and his shoulder the movement.

Creaking on its rust hinges, it swung above them for a second, letting in just enough light for Peter to get a better look at the tear-streaked grime on Morgan’s anxious face as she eyed him widely in excitement before it closed again as the ride continued its cycle.

“What-” Morgan started, staring at the ceiling where the hole had been moments before, but before she could finish, the trapdoor above them opened again and a more direct beam of dim light shone down from above. Briefly, it scoured across the floor like a search beam shining down from a helicopter, roaming the concrete floor until it caught Peter directly in the face. 

The brightness burnt at his retinas as he frowned up at the silhouette of the figure just visible behind it.

“Peter! Mo! Are you down there?”

The voice echoed through the hatch, became warped and distorted with the reverberations off the metal walls, but it was still instantly recognisable enough that Peter’s heart soared in his chest and he slumped back against the wall.

“Daddy!”

Peter flinched at Morgan’s excited voice, winced as she pushed herself off his lap with more excitement than care, but it didn’t stop the relieved grin forming on his lips.

“Tony, be careful, there’s a trapdoor!”

“Yeah, buddy, I got that,” Tony laughed dryly from above, and then there was a murmured, “thank fuck,” before the silhouette shuffled and a pale, dark haired head appeared over the edge of the hole. It was blurrier with distance than it should have been, but Peter found he really, really didn’t care in the slightest. “Are you two okay?”

“Yeah, we’re good. Jus’ a bit stuck is all.”

Morgan sighed and rolled her eyes like she was much older than her seven years.

“Peter’s head’s hurt,” she called up to her dad, and Peter pouted despite himself and the fact she was right and gave the back of her shoe a gentle nudge with his.

“Hey, traitor.”

“Peter?”

“I’m alright, Tony,” he huffed in amusement at the anxiety hanging heavy in the question, rolling his own eyes and then regretting it when his still throbbing head pulsed hotly in response. “’s jus’a concussion.”

High above him, there was a long suffering sigh. 

“Okay, so firstly, just to let you know, Pete, that would be a whole lot more convincing if you weren’t slurring like Thor at a Christmas party, and secondly, I would just like to remind you that I have a heart condition and you have a place at Columbia to take up in three weeks, so if you could put a lid on the repeated head trauma thing sometime soon, that’d be real great.”

Peter wracked his sluggish, syrupy brain for a witty mark he could yell back, but the pounding in his skull was making it harder than usual to focus and he couldn’t do anything but mutter an indignantly slurred, “Still cooler than you, Tony,” in reply.

It turned out, not unexpectedly given what had happened, that the door to the abandoned room should have been locked and the trap door they’d fallen through disabled. Underneath had once been a slide, the real exit from the ride rather than the door they’d tried to get to, but it had long since been removed after it was deemed too dangerous to be a part of the attraction any longer and a new exit built.

Which, well, Peter would definitely agree with dropping people through a floor being an unpleasant end to the attraction, but at least the people who had been on it before had had something to at least stop their descent being of the entirely vertical variety.

There was actually a door to their small metal hole too, the man who had briefly been beside Tony had told them so before he left in search of the keys to open it, one that was a couple of metres above ground level and would have once been the exit point of the slide.

“You think you can climb to that, Pete?” Tony asked, shining the flashligh of his phone towards the wooden door set in the more decorative wall just above their heads and previously out of his vision range. “You’d probably be able to push it through even if he can’t find the keys.”

“’m not sure he’d be impressed if I broke his ride though,” Peter muttered distractedly as he braced himself and his still queasy stomach for the move, and then sucked in a breath and pushed himself to his feet. Smearing blood on the tarnished wall as he stuck to the metal for support, he slowly pulled himself up on shaky legs. They threatened to buckle once he was up, his knees knocking and weak, and his head spun sickeningly at the change in altitude. His already blurry vision tunnelled again, dark spots dancing as his eyesight and balance faltered, and before he knew it, he was leaning his shoulder and head against the wall just to stay upright.

It was honestly a miracle he managed not to fall.

“Oh, he’s going to wish he only had a broken ride to deal with once you two are out of there,” Tony promised from what sounded like miles above his head, the hard edge of his tone cutting through the muffled hum in Peter’s ears. Distractedly, Peter grunted in reply he started shuffling towards the wall.

The short journey took an age, felt more of an effort than lifting the building on homecoming or wrestling that super-strength lizard in a lab coat last July, sapped more out of him than anything he’d done in a while, so it kind of sucked that when he got there, when he finally made it and dizzily looked up at the blurring door towering above him, that that was when it all went wrong.

In the back of his mind, he heard Morgan anxiously calling his name and Tony shouting in alarm from lightyears above, but their voices were quiet and warped and he couldn’t work out what they were saying. Their yelling faded into nothing at all as the earth tilted and gravity swooped and his spotty, doubled vision failed him entirely again.

***

Tony could write a novel on all the times he’d seen Peter pass out, but it never made it any easier.

From that first time at the airfield in Leipzig, through battles and exhaustion and injuries and sugar crashes, each and every slip of the kid’s grasp on consciousness made Tony’s gut cramp and his heart race and his tachycardic pulse thrum loudly with terror in his ears.

“Morgan, move!” he shouted in panic as Peter teetered backwards, his eyes rolling deep into his skull and his knees already crumbling, and Morgan, the gold hearted idiot, darted forwards determinedly. 

She did as she was told though, made it out of the way just in time for Peter to collapse backwards, landing with a heap on the concrete again. A cry of his name left her lips as he landed, her high voice wet and chocked and panicked, filled with all the worry Tony was feeling too. It echoed in the small room almost as loudly as the dull thwack Peter’s head made as it cracked against concrete again.

“Peter!”

***

There was a hand on his face.

Fingers, cold and metallic, gently slapping at his cheek in a rhythm like a thrumming pulse, and instinctively Peter reached up uncoordinated, shaky fingers to bat them away. They weren’t painful, as such, more an irritant, confusing and-

“That’s… Pete… come… eyes open.”

The voice hurt a head he hadn’t realised until then was sore, grated against his fragile ears and suddenly throbbing skull like 40 grit sandpaper on a beach, and instantly, a soft, unexpected whimper slipped from his already parted lips.

Even that whimper hurt, felt to reverberate brain matter he’d swear had been put through a blender. It drew tears from his tightly closed eyes that ran hotly sideways across his face, calved salty trails over the bridge of his nose and cut twin paths through the stickiness on his cheek.

The hand on his skin shifted, abandoning, and then the voice came back through the din in his skull, shushing him, he thought, comforting through a tension and worry he could hear despite the muffled distance in their tone. A whirring sound followed, one he knew he should have been able to place but couldn’t and then there were fingers on his face again.

They were warm this time, a little calloused and worn with years of work, but running softly over his temple. They were gentle, soothing against the pain that throbbed relentlessly and grounding against a dizziness which surged and swooped even as he lay what he was sure was still.

“Come on kid, open up.”

Metal fingers snapped so close to the ends of his nose he felt the movement of the air and flinched as the sound assaulted his sensitive ears.

“Ow.”

“Hey, there you are.”

It took Peter a while to register his eyes were open, the light low and blue and his vision blurry and doubled enough he hadn’t realised he wasn’t just seeing the starburst backs of his eyelids anymore, and even longer for his gaze to settle on Tony’s looming form and draw his worried frown back into some semblance of focus.

“You’re going to turn me and May grey if you keep collecting head injuries like Pokémon.”

“T’ny? Wha-” Blearily, his unfocused eyes wandered the room, taking in the metal walls and the weirdly placed ornate door and the trapdoor high above as the memories inched back into place at the speed of continents on the move until they collided with a quivering bang.

“Tony, ‘s Mo?” Where’s Mo? I di’n’t-”

The injured shoulder he’d forgotten about seized as he pushed himself upright in panic and his skull pulsed with the movement. The world tilted on its axis and his vision spotting out alarmingly, threatening to fail again and send him back to the concrete for a third time.

Or a fourth time, maybe? He couldn’t quite remember.

“Hey, no, you didn’t land on her,” Tony soothed, moving to catch him as he slumped dizzily, unable to see clearly enough to force his balance into functioning and too uncoordinated to steady himself. A metal hand wound its way around his waist, pulling him over to rest sideways against the familiar red chest plate and holding him there as his head swam and gravity danced and his stomach rolled threateningly.

“She still tried to catch you though, had to yell at her to move. What’d I do to deserve having two self-sacrificial kids to deal with, huh?”

Peter blinked, trying to process that with the half of his treacle ridden brain not preoccupied with keeping the cotton candy and hotdogs he’d regrettably inhaled down, and he must have come up as blank looking as he felt because the twin Tonys puckered their brows a little more and quipped their lips in poorly pulled off mocks of a comforting smile.

“She’s okay, Pete, thanks to you,” he said, and it took Peter a long moment to notice the true heaviness to those words. It made Peter wonder if maybe Tony knew he was currently suffering from what felt like one of the worst concussions he’d had in a good few months because he chose to protect Morgan’s head from the concrete rather than his own.

He’d do it again, any day. No quibbling at all.

“Hmm, where ’s she?” he asked, slurred and weak, lifting his head a little to search and coming up void. “Is she… did I scare her?”

“She’s okay, she’s with Rhodey, Pete, probably getting ice-cream right now and worrying about her big brother.”

“Rhodey?” Peter licked his numb lips as his thoughts fought to form around the miner hammering away in his skull. "Why’s Rhodey… wait, you were up there?”

Rolling his head back on Tony’s shoulder, he looked up at the hole in the ceiling faintly glowing with the light drifting into the room on the other side and then at Tony’s face. It was pinched in worry, his eyes dark and his brows furrowed anxiously, and marred with a smear of blood Peter eventually realised was probably his own. Below it was the neck of an Iron Man suit Peter hadn’t seen outside of its display case in the lab for quite some time, and it didn’t take a non-concussed genius to work out what had happened.

As best he could, Peter gathered his sticky brows into a glare.

“You’re s’post’a be retired.”

The accusation came out slow and slurred, his tongue sliding uncoordinatedly around the syllables, but Tony still raised his brows and let out a dry, humourless sort of chuckle.

“Yeah, I’m not sure you ever get to retire from parenting, kiddo.”

Pouting indignantly at the nickname he normally didn’t mind, Peter grunted in disagreement and decided it was time to pull himself together again. Ignoring his throbbing, aching head and the dizziness and the remnant blur of the double vision, he pushed himself a little more upright against Tony’s chest only to stop with a hiss as he inadvertently pulled his elbow away from the hand he hadn’t realised was supporting it.

His shoulder dropped again with the sudden weight of his arm, the ends of his broken collarbone shifting beneath his skin until Tony’s hand caught up with him again. It cupped his elbow to still his arm and then gently lifted just enough to release some of the pull from the fracture. Peter let out a wheezy exhale as the pain receded just a little.

“Yeah, careful, bud, your-”

“Collarbone’s broken, I know,” he finished weakly, giving up on his protest there and then and shakily resting his too light head back against Tony’s chest as he waited for the black spots dancing in his vision to clear again. 

A frustrated sigh brushed over his head with enough force to ruffle his sticky, clumped curls as his comment sunk home.

“Of course you knew,” Tony muttered under his breath, his tone thick with long-suffering frustration, and when Peter steadied himself enough that he could look back up without his wonky sense of balance abandoning him entirely again, he found Tony puckered browed and grimacing to match. It was the sort of expression Peter knew would be followed by him running a hand over his face at his continued self-sacrificial idiocy if both hadn’t already been occupied.

“Tony, ’m sorry,” he tried, frowning up blearily, squinting a little in the bright blue glow of the suit’s heart. “I jus’ wanted to get Mo out.”

For a long second, Tony stared, irritation and pain mixing on his face, before he sighed again and shook his head.

“Yeah, I know you did, bud,” he said eventually, his tone heavy with resignation, “but it took Rhodey literally four minutes to get here, break down that door, and fly Mo out. Another minute and you’d have been out too if you hadn’t knocked yourself out cracking concrete with your head again.”

“I thought I could make it,” Peter muttered, grimacing a little at the bluntness of Tony’s description, and then frowned indignantly when the ruby chest plate of the suit shook beneath his head as Tony huffed out a humourless, exhausted sort of laugh inside.

“With a hell of a concussion and one working arm?” he asked a little harshly, his eyebrows raised pointedly, before he seemed to realise maybe there were better times for giving Peter the ‘you’re an idiot’ speech and sighed wearily. “Yeah, kid, putting anyone else first, that sounds like you.”

Peter hummed, wondered if that was meant to be a criticism or not and then gave up on thinking and wearily rested his aching head back down on the warm metal shoulder of the suit. It throbbed at the movement, white hot pain lancing over the dull pounding that kept time with his heart and a groan slipped from his lips.

He hated concussions, hated the way they made his head thick and heavy and his thoughts slow and rambled. They made him stupid, made him tired, and he wanted nothing more than to let his leaden lids droop closed and follow its call into the bliss of unconsciousness. The nausea it brought on sat weighty and squirming in his gut and his vision was still blurry enough Tony doubled around the edges. Even laying hard against the red metal chest, his balance was off enough that he didn’t quite feel real in those moments his blinks lagged without his permission.

At least he wouldn’t have school to take it to tomorrow, he supposed. That was never fun, not the lights nor the sounds nor the smells. Usually, he ended up spending the lessons curled up with his head in his arms trying to block the burn of fluorescence from his retinas and the breaks in between camped out in the toilet at the far end of the science block willing his unstable stomach to hold out for him just a little longer.

It failed, more often than not.

Peter swallowed back that thought.

“Come on, let’s get you to the Medbay,” Tony sighed, his tone soft and smooth over the humming in his ears. It was like that the time last December when Peter had ended up delirious with a high fever after an impromptu dip in Hudson resulted in one rescued car, four saved lives and a nasty bout of pneumonia on his part.

He wasn’t sure if Tony knew he remembered that enough to know his concerned, blurry-around-the-edges expression matched almost perfectly with how it had looked when he’d scooped Peter off the floor before, but that train of thought was jolted from Peter’s mind when the metal arms beneath gently shuffled him better into their grip.

“Let’s get you some of those super spider-baby meds, hmm.”

“Don’t need the Medbay,” Peter protested half-heartedly as he was lifted into the air, his words half-hearted and more out defiance than anything else, and swallowed almost entirely when his skull and stomach protested the movement. “’m okay, jus’ need to sleep.”

With his eyes closed and his face pressed into the warm metal of the Iron Man suit, Peter didn’t see the eyeroll that got him, but he was well aware it happened just from the soft, grumbling groan Peter felt rumbling against his ear that it would usually accompany. 

“Nuh huh, concussed kiddos actively bleeding from their heads do not get to have opinions on that,” Tony protested absentmindedly as the gentle roaring of his repulsors filled the room. They kicked up dust and loose grit from the floor and rattled the chucks of concrete Peter had broken loose with his head.

The roaring was followed by movement Peter tried his best to ignore, and then lights and cackling music, and then the blessed, grounding coolness of the evening air brushed against the back of his exposed neck as Tony took him back outside.

“Shall I carry you, or do you want to walk to the car, buddy?”

“Mm, walk,” Peter muttered, lifting his head from Tony’s shoulder and squinting around at the flashing lights of the fairground. They bust like stars, fireworks of flashing colour brightening the darkness of the night sky and would almost have been considered beautiful had they not been stabbing at his skull.

Distantly, he heard Tony reply, felt his body move and his feet hit the floor, the toes of his converse skittering against the dewy grass as he did his best at getting his legs under him enough to support the little of his own body weight Tony allowed him to take. Unsurprisingly, they felt like overcooked spaghetti beneath him, did as good a job of holding him up too.

“You alright there, bud?” Tony’s arm tightened around him, took his weight entirely as he stumbled, his head spinning like he’d spent the past half an hour on the Waltzer rather than laying on the floor. The lights, already doubled and dancing, blurred impossibly, jumping in and out from behind the dark spots playing in his vision, and the music, loud and painful against his aching brain suddenly tunnelled into blissful nothingness.

The voices, Tony, Mo, Rhodey, Pepper in the distance, quietened too, and he just about heard Tony swearing under his breath before the darkening world tilted sharply on its axis and his aching, spinning head knocked against something hard once again.

***

The Tower’s Medbay was much quieter when Tony entered than it had been when he’d brought a barely conscious Peter in the evening before, the day still early enough that even the structured business of the private medical facility was yet to start. The beds in the main room were made and once again empty, the curtains drawn to let in the warm glow of the late summer sun, and the machines realigned neatly along the wall ready and waiting.

Tony swept past without paying any of it a second thought, automatically heading down the familiar corridor to the private rooms too regularly called home until he reached the Spider-Man sticker emblazoned door at the very end of the short corridor.

Morgan was responsible for the defacement of the sleek wood at the entrance to the bay that wasn’t actually owned by Peter, but he supposed the self-sacrificial idiot was in there frequently enough that her confusion was understandable. 

Loathed in its existence, but understandable all the same.

Sighing, Tony forced that thought away, forced a smile much too bright for the hour and the situation, and pushed open the door to the room he had only left little over five hours before.

“How’s the wounded soldier today?” he asked with more energy than he could truly blame on coffee as he breezed into the dimly lit room uninvited, startling May and receiving a full on glare from Peter as he sat stiffly against the raised head of his bed. 

Above the kid’s irritatedly tilted brow was a far more livid bruise, one that was dark and angry as it spilt out from the wound just beyond his hairline, and judging by the closed curtains and low lighting, a headache was still bothering him, but it was still good to see him awake and aware enough to be irritated by the teasing. It was far cry away from the pained and nauseous kid he’d struggled to keep awake let along focused for long the night before.

The concussion was bad enough to wreak havoc on Peter and his senses and meant the evening hadn’t been going well even before Cho had arrived already frowning at the x-rays of the displaced collarbone the kid had done a number on and reported that a sling alone wouldn’t provide enough support to stabilise the fracture.

It hadn’t needed surgery to fix, but it had been a close one, and judging by Peter’s muddled but repeated complaints as he tried and failed to make himself comfortable in the brace she’d put him in, possibly the preferred option.

Admittedly, though, the glowering kid did look more than a little uncomfortable with his shoulders still pulled back so stiffly his chest puffed, and Tony felt just a little guilty about his teasing in the second before Peter not so subtly flicked up one of the fingers sticking out from his sling behind his aunt’s back as he said hello.

Tony was rather pleased he’d played enough poker in his youth to keep the grin at bay as he raised his brows in mock offence.

“Peter Benjamin,” he scolded with a gasp, drawing May’s attention back to the bed and a flush to Peter’s cheeks. Tony very nearly lost his poker face at the embarrassed redness that replaced the pallor still left over from the night before, but he just about managed to maintain it as he grabbed a chair, turned it around, and sat himself down next to May beside the bed. “To be fair though, I think I’d be grumpy if I’d been forced to do an impression of Cap for the past 12 hours.”

Smirking up through tousled hair that was definitely in need of a wash, Peter gave a nonchalant sort of half shrug as best he could. “Eh, could be worse. Could be a billionaire who definitely thinks he’s funnier than he is I’m stuck doing an impression of.”

“Ouch, Arnie,” Tony winced, feigning hurt, “I was going to save the Terminator jokes until you were feeling better, but now I’m just going to add to your suffering.”

That got a huffed laugh from Peter and earnt him a glare and a sigh from May.

“Don’t you listen to the nasty old man, honey,” she cooed teasingly as she reached over to card her hand through her nephew’s bedraggled, slightly clumped curls. “He’s just jealous of your fine posture.”

Pete rolled his eyes as he instinctively tilted his head into her touch.

“Seriously, May, no one would be jealous of this, it’s uncomfy as hell.”

Pointedly, he tried to relax his back, grimacing in displeasure when he couldn’t.

“Yeah, kid has a point there,” Tony agreed, frowning too as Peter bit back a wince as he aggravated his still healing collarbone. “How’re you doing anyway, Pete? You look better than last night.”

Peter settled stiffly back against his mountain of pillows and he huffed a laugh.

“Yeah, I’m not sure that’s too hard,” he said, frowning in memory, and Tony had to agree, he did have a point there. Bloody and dazed and very much out of it was kind of hard not to improve on. “I felt like crap. Must’a looked like- must have looked awful too; I’m pretty sure there’s still blood in my hair.” 

“You say that like it’s a rarity, honey,” May mused with a pursed lip, picking pointedly at one of the hardened curls missed by the damp cloth the evening before. Her fingers teased it apart, flaking small flecks of red confetti onto the white pillows, and Peter grimaced in disgust, his nose wrinkling comically.

“May, that’s awful, please stop.”

Laughing lightly, May tenderly carded her hand through his hair again, inadvertently freeing more flakes much to Peter’s displeasure, and then sighed.

“I should get going.” 

Tony frowned.

“Duty calls?”

“Yeah,” she said a little ruefully, her eyes still on Peter. “Some of us have work to get to.”

Despite her words, she lingered beside the bed for a little longer her expression torn, and then sighed again and patted Peter’s head.

“Alright, I should go. Is Pad Thai good for dinner? With extra peanuts?”

Peter smiled and ran a hand through his hair in a vain attempt at pushing the unstyled, tangled curls her carding had knocked loose away from his eyes.

“Yeah, sounds great.”

“Alright, I’ll pick it up on the way home. Get some rest today, okay?” She pursed her lips, eyed him seriously, her expression twisting at the bruising on his forehead in a way Tony understood. “No lab stuff. Definitely no Spider-Man.”

Rolling his eyes like that was a given and Tony hadn’t caught him out swinging with a concussion before, Peter huffed a laugh. “Yeah, I know.”

“Don’t spend too much time on your phone, either; you’ll just make your headache worse.”

“I know, I won’t.”

“Wear your sling.”

“Yes, May.”

“And that brace.”

“May!”

May laughed as Peter tried to push her away, his expression torn between amusement and embarrassment and pure irritation. 

“Okay, okay, I’m going. I’ll see you later, okay?”

“Yeah, May. I larb you.” 

“I larb you too.” She reached down to press a kiss to his hair, tenderly brushed it back again when she knocked it loose and it flopped stiffly over his eyes. “This mop could do with a cut before you start college,” she mused, ignoring Peter’s glare as she straightened her scrubs and put on her coat. “Alright, bye, honey. Bye, Tony.”

When she reached the sticker emblazoned doorway, she paused and turned back, but instead of blowing Peter the kiss Tony had been expecting her to, she held up two fingers to her brow and gave her kid a quick salute before she left. Unexpectedly, Peter looked more tired than surprised by the gesture, rolling his eyes and leaning back into his pillows, and Tony abruptly realised that despite her scolding, he hadn’t been the only one making fun of Peter’s suddenly stiff posture.

“Hey, bud,” he said, drawing back the kid’s attention and getting a proper look at his face for the first time since he’d sat down. The brown eyes met his were still a little pinched against the dim lighting and circled by bags as dark as the bruising marring his pale forehead, but at least they were now focused and aware, the haze of the concussion and strong pain killers he’d been on the night before all but gone. “You okay?”

Peter smiled tiredly. “Yeah, I’m okay. Really. Bit sore, but could have been worse, you know?” He paused in thought, and then scoffed a humourless laugh and frowned down at his hands. “Could have been much worse.”

Tony nodded in grim agreement, very aware of the fresh bags beneath his eyes to rival Peter’s. They hadn’t been there the day before, hadn’t arrived there overnight by coincidence either, and were only partially to do with having been up with Peter until the early hours. He’d seen the kid hurt before, much more seriously so than he was now, so that was an ache in his side but nothing new, and Morgan was fine, asleep in her bed with her army of plushies in the room just down the hall, but the speed with which a normal day had gone so badly wrong, how easily it could have ended even worse, still rattled him.

“Hey, Mo made this for you to add to your collection,” he said instead of replying, eager not to dwell on what very easily could have happened while Peter was in the room.

The card was a little rumpled from being in his jacket pocket, but Peter perked up again when he saw it and held out his hand with a smile. His expression was soft as melting butter as he scanned the scenes carefully illustrated on the thick, folded white card in a mixture of pencil, felt tip, and fruit scented glittery gel pens.

“She’s getting good,” he mused.

“Hmm she is. You give her too much practice, Pete,” Tony said lightly, watching as Peter rolled his eyes in response as he ran a careful finger over the fairground themed drawings that decorated the front. They were good though, he felt as proud a dad looking at them as Peter seemed to, even if he would rather Morgan hadn’t had to make anything to add to the stack of her ‘get well soon’ cards Peter kept in his bedside cabinet. 

It took him a second to notice when Peter’s soft smile faltered to a wince at the amount of red that covered the head of the taller, mop-haired figure in the drawing Morgan had done on the inside.

“I’m glad she’s okay.” He frowned as he gave the image a poke with the index finger sticking out of his sling. “Not just… physically, but like, her life is weird, you know. Even without me introducing my shitty Parker luck and nearly getting her killed in a fairground.”

Tony laughed at that. “Yeah, you could say that again, but she’s a tough cookie. She’ll be fine with whatever we throw at her, I think.”

“Yeah,” Peter agreed, glancing up, “She’s like her dad.”

“Like her brother too.”

The kid in the bed huffed, briefly looking like he might argue, before his expression suddenly brightened again.

“Oh, Tony, that reminds me!” Grimacing a little, he reached over and snagged the newspaper Tony hadn’t really considered before from his bedside table. “Have you seen this?”

With a grin playing on his lips, he held out the paper, and when Tony took it and turned it round to see what Peter was trying to show him, he fully understood what his heroic idiot of a kid was smirking at.

Beside an article Tony didn’t really want to indulge in reading was an image someone had snapped the night before. It was of him, naturally dressed in the Iron Man suit sans mask and standing in the middle of a fairground. The bright lights reflected off his suit, the Ferris wheel mirrored recognisably off his thigh a drop tower on his shoulder, and the haunted house Tony was already in the process of suing was visible behind him.

He looked out of place amongst the crowd and rides as did the worried, ruffled Morgan beside him, but neither of them were as out of place as the concerned expression he was wearing or the limp, brown haired figure he had cradled carefully in his arms.

“Iron Man is Iron Dad,” he read, eyebrows raised, before turning back to thankfully conscious and irritatingly smirking Peter and letting out a long suffering sigh. That one had been coming for him for a long time now, he supposed, and honestly, he couldn’t even deny it.

“See, bud,” he said, turning to the grinning kid in the bed, “I told you parents never get to really retire, didn’t I?”


End file.
